Beast: Part Two by Ella James Read Free Book Online Page A

He’s juiced up on adrenaline and moving fast. Still, I could evade him. I just…don’t.
    I let him get me in the ribs, just under my pec, and then I drive my longer, heavier shank into his back.
    It’s not a clean kill.
    We wrestle in a spray of water droplets and a haze of steam, rolling in a sea of blood so thick I’m glad I know McGuire tested negative at his physical a week ago.
    I drive my shank into his muscular neck, and the smell of blood fills my head. Oh. Because it’s spraying all over me.
    He’s fallen down on his back beside the drain. His eyes are slits, but his body is still twitching, still trying to buck although he doesn’t even have the strength to jeopardize my balance as I straddle him, preparing to get him once more in the jugular.
    “W-why?” he coughs. Blood gurgles in his throat. The smell is so overpowering, it takes everything I have not to get up and stumble out of the shower room.
    I’m feeling head-fucked, so I end things quickly, burying my shank in his jugular then climbing off his body fast.
    I think, after I rinse myself off and walk back toward my room in my wet clothes, how I could have answered: “For those kids you were picked up with that time in ’03.”
    Motherfucker might have been raped, but he turned into a rapist, too. That’s not why he was in—McGuire headed up an MC, where he killed anyone he didn’t like—but he was a diaper sniper, too. I’m probably the only one around here who knows it.
    I shake my head. Hold out my arm and run my pruned-up fingertips along the cement wall. I’m feeling light and airy, like a helium balloon.
    I barely make it to my door without tripping or passing out. As soon as I’m inside, I puke in the sink, then use one of the many prepaids I have to let my boss know it’s been done.
    “Burns has been instructed to lead the group in the way that I described? With focus on cocaine and heroin?”
    “Coming up,” I tell him.
    I pull on a jacket and step into my closet, where I shake off all vestiges of pain and weakness and spend two hours getting Burns hyped up about his new position. When I’ve guaranteed his loyalty to me and proposed a few lucrative-seeming business deals, promising to use some of the Hammond fortune to funnel into his group’s illicit accounts—thereby getting my bosses the account numbers—and suggesting there is good money right now in cocaine and heroin, if his guys can get it from this supplier I know down in Colombia—I cut him loose and peel the jacket off.
    Lots of blood.
    My blood.
    Fuck.
    I stumble toward the shower, but my head is spinning. Re-route to my bed and reach my shaking hand under the pillow. The creases around my fingernails are still lined with blood, but I’m too tired to get up and wash again. I know I’m contaminating the screen of this outdated iPhone, but I don’t care. I just want to see her face: Angel in Technicolor.
    So many pictures… Paid someone to get them. Lots of years.
    High school prom.
    College …soccer.
    Angel.
    I call Clinton right before I pass the fuck out. The smell of blood… Her face. So many stars. “Go get her. I don’t…care what time…it is.”
     
    *
     
    Annabelle
     
    Mom’s night nurse wakes me a little after five a.m. with wide eyes. She whispers that there’s someone at the door.
    “Clinton, he says it is.”
    And that’s the first of the alarm bells.
    The second, really. His arrival at this early hour is the first. I pull a robe over my night clothes and hurry to living area. I swing the door open and check him out. He looks normal enough in his brown uniform and boots.
    “Clint on. What’s going on?”
    “I came to get you,” he says.
    “Right now?”
    He nods. “Yeah.”
    “Why? He asked for me?”
    “That’s why I come and get you, isn’t it?”
    “Yeah. Guess so. What’s with the early hour?”
    He shrugs.
    I raise a skeptical eyebrow at him, then leave him waiting as I change out of my pajamas, call Holly over, and get